It was no way to treat a war hero.
It took Paddy the Pigeon nearly five hours to fly back to England with news of the DDay landings in 1944, as all around him birds with the same messages were getting shot down, lost or distracted by French female pigeons.
But his Dickin medal for gallantry was disposed of in less than a minute in Whyte's auction rooms in Dublin at the weekend, and for less than the catalogue's estimate.
The sole consolation for Paddy, who was from Co Antrim, is that the medal - known as "the animal's Victoria Cross" and one of only 53 awarded - will stay in Ireland. A £5,500 opening postal bid from the US was quickly overhauled by one in the room for £6,000, and that was that. Immediately after the hammer fell, the auctioneer's phone rang with a press query, provoking inevitable jokes about Charlie Bird. But apart from that, there was general anti-climax that the medal had gone so quickly.
The buyer turned out to be a businessman, Mr Kevin Spring, from Templeogue, one of Dublin's best-known pigeon-fanciers and, as a commandant in the FCA, a military man. With his double interest in the medal, he had nursed an intention to buy it for several weeks. "I told nobody, hoping it wouldn't attract much attention," he said. "So when the papers got hold of it, I was afraid there'd be a lot of bidders."
He was ready to pay "substantially" more for it, but declined to say how much. At £6,000, though, he is convinced he got the bargain of the year, even if the auctioneer's commission pushed the price to nearer £7,000. "The Irish Independent had an article about good and bad investments recently, and this was in the second category. I predict time will prove them wrong," he said.
Indeed, within minutes the investment was already paying off, with the presentation to him of a commemorative gold, pigeon-shaped tie-pin.
The other star item in the day-long sale, a group of medals relating to republicanism from the Fenians through 1916 and beyond, went to an American bidder for £5,000. A medal from Louth's 1957 All-Ireland victory, almost as rare as an award for pigeon bravery, was withdrawn; while a file of documents handled personally by Hitler failed to reach its reserve price of £1,000.
The sale, which featured everything from an 1879 medal for the "technical execution on porcelain and original grouping of flowers" (£50) to one for "best bull" at the 1894 Spring Show (£120), raised about £150,000.
